Greetings list!
Now we are back from journeys / holidays / vacations .... I'd like to
take the opportunity to try to open up discussion around some questions
in my head following some summer reading.
I've been looking at some recent publications by British scholars around
the theme of children abandoned or abandoning of their own families - or
- from what list member Lynn Abrams in her new book calls - from
'Broken Homes'.
The Orphan Country: Children of Scotland's Broken Homes from 1845 to the
Present Day (1998) John Donald Publishers. Edinburgh.
At the same time I have been reading work by another list member,
Catherine Panter-Brick whose edited volume, Biosocial Perspectives on
Children (1998) Cambridge University Press is a very useful collection
of material using cross-cultural and child-centred perspectives to
forcibly remind us that the child as 'victim' is problematic within a
framework which embraces plurality of childhoods.
Lynn Abrams book, although focussing on Scotland, is I would say a
useful or even essential volume on any indicative reading list for the
study of the history of childhood and family. She has worked together
personal testimony and local records of orphanages and other
institutions dealing with children in perceived need of care or welfare.
Its a fascinating study with rich data including an excellent chapter on
child emigration to Canada which complements Joy Parr's earlier work.
She concludes with a chapter entitled 'The Voice of the Child' which
deals with issues of identity and belonging.
However, the voice of the child - as a social actor in the sense that
Allison James, Alan Prout, Chris Jenks suggest as a legitimate approach
in this area - does not come through as strongly as I would have hoped.
This is a scholarly study using mainly documentary sources to good
effect. The 'voice of the child' while there in oral testimony, is
marginal.
And so to my question - or thoughts - one of the many problems facing
scholars who are attempting to give a voice to those neglected by
historians - and in particular in relation to without doubt traumatic
life experience - is how to present the material powerfully and strongly
without representing the subject as victim, vulnerable, weak... There
are parallels here with aspects of Women's History.
Catherine Panter-Brick 's approach is - I think - to suggest that
seeing the child as victim and using terminology such as abandonment,
lost, 'robbed of their childhoods' is not allowing the child a voice and
allowing only one modern western notion of childhood to act as the norm.
Her questioning of the term 'abandonment' and actually expanding that
term to include children abandoning their families, children abandoned
by State and society, ...as well as her reminder of the plurality of
childhoods has been very useful to me .
Lynn Abrams states, unequivocally, 'Children were the most vulnerable
victims of family breakdown' and 'Child abandonment has always been used
as a last resort by desperate women'
Now I am puzzled and am questioning almost every word in these
statements!
thanks to both Lynn and Catherine for my headache!
any thoughts on all of this?
--
Catherine Burke
7 The Windses
Grindleford
Hope Valley
S 32 2HY
Tel: 01433 631907
Dr. Catherine Burke
Lecturer in Education: Child & Family Studies,
Bretton Hall College
West Bretton
WF4 4LG
01924 830261
http://panizzi.shef.ac.uk/med/cathy/homepage.html
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